Category: Client Work

As with Livity (see previous post), Anyways and I have been trying to work with each other for a good while now. Just as 2019 was entering its endgame, our calendars, emails and geographies finally aligned and I came on board to do some editorial strategy for the Converse London concept that Anyways had established for the shoe brand a few months earlier.

What a joy it was! As you’d no doubt expect from the sister agency of It’s Nice That. I’ve been blessed to work with numerous agencies stuffed full of great people, but I don’t think I’ve ever worked anywhere that has made me feel so immediately at ease and inspired all at once.

Anyway(s): It’s always a little hard to gauge the ROI on top-level stuff like this, but certainly the Converse London Instagram channel, through which all of the activity is activated and housed, has exploded since we finished the project. When we began in December, it was hovering around 9,000 followers, about eight months on from launch. As of writing this, a couple of months later, it has 14.6K followers!

The really wonderful (and uniquely admirable) agency Livity gave me a great opportunity at the beginning of the year to help them at concept stage for a ‘non-traditional’ campaign that Sky Atlantic had commissioned them to create for their new flagship drama, Gangs of London. I was tasked with coming up with disruptive, scalable and mixed-media ideas that might catch the public’s eye and imagination in ways that Sky’s usual billboards and trailers might not.

It was great to experience a role that I normally perform adjacent to/in collaboration with, particularly on something so high-profile (the show is directed by Gareth Edwards who made the superlative action movie, The Raid; it stars about half the cast of the Game of Thrones and one of the leads from Peaky Blinders). The timelines were slightly cramped and it was a bit of a tricksy show to deal with (how do you bring a show’s USP into an everyday setting when that USP is essentially ultraviolence?) but James at Livity did an incredible job bringing it all together and pushing some of my ideas into a better, more presentable place!

A long-term project from 2019 finally saw the light of day earlier this year. I worked extensively on the narrative elements for Ocado Group’s new website, as they pivoted their business from grocery e-commerce to a more expansive and ambitious tech position. Certainly one of the most challenging and complex projects I’ve ever worked on!

Another – though in fact the first – luxury hotel rebranding project undertaken with Evolve.

I can’t put into words what a joy this was to work on, coming as it did in the midst of a couple of particularly gruelling long-term projects. I basically got to write a series of short-story-type vignettes, all with the aim of evoking the great rebrand Evolve are carrying out for the once great (and somewhat infamous) Byblos hotel in southern Spain. It all ended up going a little bit early Bret Easton Ellis, a little bit early Richard Ford, with some liberal quoting of Spencer Krug lyrics thrown in for good measure.

To round off a great project, Evolve beautifully rendered everything I wrote in print for the new owners of the hotel – something I rarely get to see.

This year I’ve continued to work with BEINGHUNTED on numerous bits and pieces for adidas – far too many to separate out here. They’re always nice to work on, and given that they generally focus on upcoming special releases and collaborations they afford me the chance to indulge the lingering, geeky interest I have in sneakers and outdoors/sportswear.

To pluck some specific things out of the air that I’ve leant my words to:

the string of ZX/Torsion anniversary releases

recent collaborations with Hender Scheme

various releases/content relating to adidas Consortium’s new ‘Communitas’ output

Was a tremendous honour to take on the role of ‘editor-in-chief’ for the second issue of BEINGHUNTED magazine – even if the grandiose title doesn’t naturally sit comfortably with me! The project coincided with a very difficult time for my family, so I’m tremendously grateful to Jörg (aka Mr. BEINGHUNTED) for not only the opportunity but his patience as well.

I contributed the cover story – an interview with/feature on the Pritzker-winning Chinese architect Wang Shu, and one of the editorial pieces I’ve been most proud of over the past year or so (not that I have time to do as many as I like these days, sadly).

The issue also contains a condensed version of the catalogue I wrote for a GORE-TEX exhibition that launched during Paris Fashion Week in January, and an ‘in-conversation with’-type piece on the nature of artistic collectives in today’s globalised world.

If you feel like spending 15 quid or so on a print magazine you can do that here! Or find it in various trendy magazine/fashion type places around the world.

adidas Runners is the global network of adidas-affiliated running clubs. Earlier this year, I worked with act3 on a number of small projects, helping to elevate various pieces of content about adidas Runners around the world.

From ‘trash running’ in China to conquering the gruelling Los Angeles-Las Vegas speed project, all were super-interesting (particularly as someone who is increasingly obsessive about his own running).

I spent a good month or two recently working on a(n ongoing) project for The HEINEKEN Company. I probably shouldn’t (/can’t) probably say too much about it at this point, but it involved heading over to their heatwave-drenched head office in Amsterdam for a week of great workshops, and following up with a deep-dive into various content, brand and communications-related matters, many of which – there was no getting around it – forced me to work repeatedly out of my comfort zone. By which I mean: within Excel documents.

Earlier this year I started working with the great branding agency Evolve on various rebranding briefs for luxury hotels around the world. Mount Juliet is one such client: a beautiful five-star Irish estate with ambitions to offer something beyond the luxury golfing holidays that have become its bread and butter.

As with all the briefs I get from Evolve, I was given the freedom to push things in a more creative direction than I normally do in this type of work.

At the risk of sounding immodest (though as a self-employed millennial living in the shadow of neoliberalism and all the intense pressures to be ‘entrepreneurial’ that brings, I feel like I get a free pass), the feedback I received included the following:

“the work you did on Mt Juliet, once again it’s taken it to the next level – think there was a few teary eyes once we had finished reading it – not easy to get under the skin of board level directors in that way so really credit to you for helping us elicit that emotional response.”

I’ve been working quite a lot this year on various projects with Ocado, helping them on the digital side of things as they pivot from being the world’s biggest online grocery retailer to being a tech-driven solutions company.

The first thing to see the light of day from this, earlier this year, was a new careers site – aimed at recruiting exactly the people they need to achieve their ambitious new goals. I was involved a little in the content strategy while also writing the vast majority of the copy for the new site.